Evernote Scannable Review

The dream is to live in a paperless world, but that’s hard when people keep giving us receipts, business cards, brochures, and other notes on paper. But with the help of Evernote’s new Scannable app you can transfer all these bits of paper onto your iPad where they are more useful.

These could be digitized with a dedicated document scanner, but the camera in your tablet does a decent job of it, and it’s much more convenient, especially if you’re on the go.

Evernote Scannable — Share Items

It’s as simple as pointing the tablet’s camera at the item to be converted and letting Scannable do the rest. The app will do it’s best to identify items to be scanned so the process is completely automatic, but in our tests we generally found it easier to use Manual mode, in which an on-screen shutter tells the software to capture an image and then convert it.

The cameras built into Apple’s tablets are quite good, so text on the business card or other documents that have been digitized is completely readable. That said, it’s difficult to hold a camera exactly in front of the item, so the scanned image is often slightly distorted; fortunately, Scannable includes a tool that lets the user easily identify the four corners of each page, and the software will make the scan into an even rectangle.

This is not a full OCR app, so all the text that is scanned in isn’t converted to text. But there is an exception: when business cards are entered, Scannable will read the information and use it to look the person up on the business-networking service LinkedIn. The user can then automatically add the phone number and email address to their iPad’s contact list.

Everything that’s digitized can be converted to a PDF and then emailed, or made into a JPG and added to the Camera Roll or sent as a text. Naturally, items can also be inserted into Evernote, and the PDFs can be sent to any other app that supports “Open in…”

This isn’t the first iOS app to let your tablet function as a scanner, but it’s quite a good one, and it’s completely free. There’s not even ads. Download Evernote Scannable today and try it for yourself.